The Sewing Circles of Herat: My Afghan Years. Christina Lamb
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my teeth in water left from the previous night’s hand-washing. Abdul Razzak and some of his mujaheddin were crouched in the early sun, brushing their teeth with twigs or clipping facial hair, using their small round silver snuffboxes as mirrors.
We set off through the desert, not the majestic sands of T.E. Lawrence or Wilfred Thesiger, but endless grey plains which absorbed and amplified the beating sun and abandoned villages that had been turned into battlefields scattered with spent ammunition. In one village we got out and wandered around, identifying the bombed-out remains of the clinic, the prison and the school, one wall covered with children’s charcoal drawings of Soviet helicopters shooting down stick people. The mujaheddin leapt onto the burnt-out hull of a tank for me to photograph them, striking poses with their Kalashnikovs and rocket-launchers. Two ragged children suddenly emerged from one of the ruins, hand-in-hand, their faces and eyelashes grey with dust, the only survivors, begging for food. I could not imagine what they were living on and they fell upon my packet of emergency digestive biscuits, stuffing them into their mouths.
We were supposed to follow in each other’s footprints because of land-mines but the dust kept blowing them away. There was dust everywhere, coating my clothes, in my hair, my ears, my fingernails and mouth, the wind lifting it up in columns so that sometimes it was difficult to see, and giving everything a gritty feel. It was at least 40°C, and my thirst made my head ache, but instead of water Ratmullah appeared clutching marigolds which he shyly presented me for my hair and laughed when I tucked them behind my ears. Like many mujaheddin, I often saw him walking around casually clutching a flower, sometimes hand-in-hand with a friend. Later, when I got to know him better, I asked him why they loved flowers so much and he replied; ‘because they are peace and beauty and everything we have lost’.
The author on a destroyed Soviet tank, near Kandahar, 1988.
Our destination was Abdul Razzak’s secret training camp cum madrassa or religious school in an area called Khunderab, inside a narrow gorge hidden by overhanging mountains, the entrance blasted out of the rock with dynamite. A guard sat at a table, an old black telephone in front of him. Abdul Razzak explained it was part of a wireless phone system captured from the Russians, and enabled camp-guards to call a military post on top of the mountains where they had men stationed with anti-aircraft guns if an enemy approached.
The camp, which acted as a training and rest camp for fighters for the Mullahs Front, had existed for about a year, moving there after the previous site was bombed by Soviet Mig 17s for seventy-four hours continuously, destroying all their weapons and killing fifty men. ‘There were forty planes dropping 3000 bombs,’ said one man with what I presumed was the usual Afghan exaggeration of multiplying everything by ten, ‘it was the only day we couldn’t pray.’
Prayer was an important feature of camp-life. The camp was home to eighty men and forty-two students aged from eight to eighteen and Abdul Razzak took me to see the school where children studied the Koran and Arabic. We watched a recitation lesson, boys rocking back and forth as they intoned the words of the Koran, and Abdul Razzak gave some religious books he had brought from Quetta to the white-bearded teacher. Hamid told me that for boys educated in madrassas, the rocking becomes such a habit that later in life they cannot read without it. Had we but known it, we were seeing the incipient Taliban. In my diary I wrote: ‘Mohammed Jan is eight. After Koranic lessons he learns how to load a BM12’.
Next we saw the boys’ dormitory – camouflaged from above with a roof of tree branches and hay that allowed air to circulate, keeping it cool inside. A small boy sat in the doorway cleaning a pile of Kalashnikovs. There seemed to be weaponry everywhere. ‘We have thirty-five RPG7, forty-two RR82mm recoil rifles, seven anti-aircraft guns,’ said Razzak. They also had two Stinger missiles left of an initial six which they received in November 1987, kept under twenty-four-hour guard, though they happily took them out to pose for photographs. Nine hundred of these heat-seeking missiles had been provided by the Americans to the resistance in 1986–7 along with British Blowpipes and were thought to have turned the tide of the war by countering the threat of Soviet air superiority though many were instead sold on to Iran, forcing the CIA to launch a buyback programme which did not stop them later turning up everywhere from Angola to Algeria.
The camp was run by Abdul Razzak’s friend Khadi Mohammed Gul who said he was twenty-eight but looked at least ten years older. He told me he had wanted to be a mullah, a village priest, but had joined the resistance and in 1983 been captured by the Soviets and sent to Pul-i-Charki, the notorious prison on the outskirts of Kabul. Run by KHAD, the East-German trained Afghan secret police, it held around 10,000 political dissidents. He was there for four years until he was released in a prisoner swap when Razzak captured a top commander from the Afghan regime.
Survivors of Pul-i-Charki were rare and I asked him about life there. ‘We knew whenever the Soviets had suffered heavy casualties because they would take a whole lot of prisoners, remove their blood for transfusions then shoot them,’ he said. He also told of awful tortures. ‘Sometimes it would be electric shocks to the nose, ears, teeth and genitals, so many that now I am impotent. Other times they tied us to trees with our feet on broken glass and left us for several days until the wounds went rotten and there were maggots inside. Another punishment was to give us food with laxative or something bad in to cause diarrhoea then leave us in a room one meter square so we would have to live in our own excreta for days. Sometimes at night they would call someone’s name and we would know he was being shot but we would say “bye!” as if he was going for a trip but we knew he’d never come back.’
The words hung heavily in the air and we sat there for a while in silence. Then I asked to see the rest of the camp. There was a clinic with a few lint bandages and a box of aspirins where a doctor was cleaning a horrible suppurating wound on the thigh of a fighter who sat silently despite the agonising treatment, and a bakery where young boys were slapping flat wide oblongs of dough onto the wall of a large clay pot buried in the ground with hot coals in the bottom to make nan, the traditional unleavened bread. Some other boys were scrubbing clothes in the small river and it was hard not to notice the red staining the water. A few goats and sheep were grazing and there was a small plantation of okra or ladyfingers as well as several apple trees so the camp was more or less self-sufficient.
The camp had strict rules, one of which was ‘men must be taught religious teachings as much as possible’. Everyone was checked at the gate and there were heavy penalties for sneaking out weapons or ammunition.3 ‘You see we are not like those other groups which steal the money and sell the arms to the Iranians,’ said Gul. ‘This is what jihad is meant to be.’ He pointed out that many villagers used the clinic, which was the only medical facility for perhaps fifty miles, and all wanted their boys to be accepted to study at the school as free board was provided.
It was the first time I had seen a mujaheddin group making an effort to provide facilities to civilians. At the main gate as we were leaving, an exhausted ten-year-old boy named Safa Mohammed had just arrived ‘to join the resistance’ after a fourteen-hour walk through the mountains. ‘My father was killed by the Russians and I ran away from my mother,’ he said. ‘First I want to study but when I grow up I will carry a gun and kill Soviets.’
It was evening as we drove away, bumping across rutted mountain tracks, headlights off to avoid being spotted by a Russian plane. The area was heavily mined so two brave men walked in front of the wheels of the jeeps, testing the ground as we followed slowly behind. Of all the many ways to die or be injured in Afghanistan, mines were the scariest. The Soviets had scattered them everywhere, including what the